ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, June 30, 1996 TAG: 9606280010
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: RICHMOND
SOURCE: ROBERT LITTLE STAFF WRITER
The clock read three hours and counting, and the trained operatives knew that one slip could shatter a multimillion-dollar government agency beyond repair.
There were no cyanide capsules or exploding attache cases. Just three people, a dark corner and a locked door.
And $15,000 worth of pingpong balls under wraps.
Jerry Smith had the key, and the cold, steely-eyed intensity of a former strongman for the feds.
Movita Daniel had the secret pass card. She paled next to Smith if measured in brawn, but carried the unmistakable air of the woman in charge.
And Andrea Bilotto lurked behind them both, inconspicuous, almost, but ever-present, watching every twitch and taking notes for the bosses.
Different paths brought the three together one Wednesday night, deep in the innards of a chilly Richmond-area television studio, the countdown ticking. But each had accepted the same mission: Pick the day's lottery numbers. And do it right.
Smith and Daniel got started just after 8 p.m. She with the card, he with the key, they simultaneously threw the latch and entered the lottery vault, otherwise just a locked back room at the WRIC studio in suburban Richmond.
The lights clicked on with a hum, automatically activating the surveillance cameras overhead. The first order of business: a phone call to central command. "We're in," was the message. Ready to proceed as planned.
Smith took control. He knelt by the safe on the floor and manipulated the lock, shielding each move like he was trying to light a fire in a strong wind. He slid open the door to reveal dozens of hard black cases, which might have held nerve gas or sniper rifles if the situation were nearly as grave as everyone's behavior seemed to suggest.
But then in the government numbers racket, this was as serious as it gets. Smith, Daniel and Bilotto were, on this day, the keepers of the balls. Perfect, balanced, accurate-within-hundredths-of-a-gram lottery balls, to be precise. Each worth some $10 apiece. A pittance, lottery officials figure, compared to the $200 million in annual winnings those precious plastic pieces parcel out every year.
"Maybe it seems like overkill," remarked Virginia Lottery spokeswoman Paula Otto, watching in the background. "But we need to make people confident of the integrity of the drawings. If they don't trust us, they won't play."
And so lottery officials have designed a $200,000-a-year security procedure, packed with practice runs, backup machines, triple checks and monotonous equipment tests.
Daniel runs the drawing, and has since the lottery began. She is the one who will actually draw the numbers - by remote, off-camera control station - once everything is in place. Smith provides the security and the muscle. He took his 20-hour-a-week post more recently, after work in various government services including the U.S. Marshal's office.
And Bilotto - or some other auditor from the public accounting firm Deloitte & Touche - watches the entire process to make sure they do it right.
They are regulars, but all expendable. Replacements wait on standby until the last team member reports in.
All of it starts on the institutional-green tiles of the storage room, a place that looks like a cross between a government laboratory and a jail cell. They consider number-picking a science in there, not something you do lightly. Or something to be done in comfort, apparently. Every move the lottery workers make, every piece of equipment they touch, is done according to script, an elaborate, meticulous, exacting procedure designed to make every drawing as random as possible.
Just after the team members enter the equipment bunker, they hold a minilottery of sorts by drawing numbers from envelopes selected at random. The goal: Pick which machines will be used to draw the night's numbers. And a backup, too. They hold another drawing to see which sets of balls will go in those machines. They have 60 sets to pick from. They only need three.
Once the balls are selected and the control numbers double checked for accuracy, Smith squeezes a white glove onto the end of his arm and begins to do what few men may - not only protect the balls, but actually touch them, too. With the glove on, of course. Contact with skin is forbidden.
He takes each ball out of its protective foam nest and places it on a specially calibrated scale, encased in Plexiglas to keep out drafts and dust. Each ball in the set must weigh within .14 grams of its partners or they'll all be scrapped. Someone weighs every ball this way, every day. And not just the Pick 3 drawing, but the Pick 4, Cash 5 and Lotto balls as well.
"We have to be precise here for the drawing to be precise at 11 o'clock," said Daniel, the lottery's drawing coordinator. "With a live drawing, anything can happen."
Perhaps at this point a little perspective would be helpful.
In the seven years that lottery officials have been weighing the balls every day - and auditing the process once a month, and calibrating the scale every quarter - they've never found a bad ball. In fact, they've never found one even marginally out of whack. They are, after all, dealing with $10 pingpong balls. Not much could go wrong.
There have been other problems, usually with the drawing itself. Like "the greatest foul of all time," as Otto called it. A mechanical breakdown, then a manual breakdown, all culminating in a little round number bouncing in slow motion across the studio floor, lottery officials and home-viewing gamblers aghast. The lottery director, watching from home, arrived within minutes. They reloaded the balls and held another drawing off-camera.
But glitches are few. We are talking about plastic balls and air blowers here, after all, not astrophysics. At the game's most basic level, all it takes to draw the numbers is some machines, some balls and a few bingo-hall graduates to press the buttons.
Only a civilian would take that to mean that running the lottery drawing like NORAD is anything but a necessity, however. Certainly no one who's ever taken the call from Ed in Winchester who thinks the machine in last Thursday's drawing had two sixes in it and he wants the FBI to investigate.
"One woman drove down here from Fairfax to watch the videotape because she was sure we'd gotten it wrong," said Daniel. "Afterward, she thought we'd doctored the tape. Sometimes, you can't win."
And so they drone through their surreal lottery ritual, weighing balls that weigh almost nothing, writing paperwork no one reads. They hold a rehearsal drawing before the real one to make sure the numbers are actually coming out at random. As if randomness were something the main-office wonks measure with a stick, and a team of accountants confirms with a pencil.
They keep an open phone line to lottery headquarters from the time they start rehearsals until the last official drawing is confirmed. They fax all the paperwork - test results, control numbers and, yes, the weights of the balls - to the agency bigwigs before they can leave.
If you talk to Daniel and Smith long enough, you can almost get them to admit it's all just for show. But the people love a good show, they know. And lottery players? They demand it.
Some even request results of the rehearsal drawings, positive that they can track patterns and predict winners. The biggest skeptics are invited to witness the drawings themselves. Some leave satisfied, others convinced it's all an elaborate ruse.
And the truth is, there's good reason to worry. Any well-informed lottery professional can tell you about Pennsylvania's infamous "triple-six fix" of 1980.
Eight people - including the emcee at the television station where the numbers were drawn - rigged the daily drawing and reaped a multimillion-dollar haul. With help from a lottery official, they used syringes to inject latex paint into the pingpong balls used to pick the numbers - all the numbers except fours and sixes. Then they bet on all eight combinations of 4 and 6. The winning number was 6-6-6. The payout: $3.5 million, a record at the time.
Investigators broke the scheme after noticing some unusual betting patterns - $10,000 wagered in one place, for instance.
"Let's be honest about it: Integrity and credibility are the absolute necessities for the success of any state lottery," said Bob Herb, the Pennsylvania Lottery's director of security. "We learned our lesson."
And so did every government-run gambling operation this side of the sun. They all have security setups similar to Virginia's, including - maybe especially - Pennsylvania.
"Our job is to protect and uphold the integrity of the lottery every day behind the scenes," said Smith, a former prison guard who seems to prefer flexing over talking as his primary method of communication.
"No system created by man is going to be foolproof," he said. Then he paused a minute and put a hand behind his neck, clearly pondering the utter precision of his job. "But I can't imagine how anything could go wrong."
LENGTH: Long : 165 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. Jerry Smith and lottery drawing specialist Movitaby CNBDaniel monitor the 10:58 p.m. drawing conducted May 22 by Bill
Blevins (left). Preparations begin at 8 p.m. for a show that lasts
no more than a minute or two.
2. Virginia Lottery security man Jerry Smith makes sure
everything's done correctly as a Pick 6 ball machine is run through
a post-drawing exercise May 22 at WRIC's Richmond TV studio.
Machines are checked before, during and after drawings to make sure
all ball sequences are random.
3. They're weighed, they're counted - but they're never touched
by ungloved hands. Skin oils can throw off the weight of one of
these $10 pingpong balls enough to affect a Virginia Lottery
drawing. color.< MIKE HEFFNER Landmark News Service